AMD Radeon R9 290X Takes Multiple 3DMark World Records

On the day that AMD launched their latest and greatest GPU, the Radeon R9 290X, the company also allows overclockers to post their scores to the popular benchmark competition website, HWBot. It comes as no surprise, then, that AMD’s newest GPU got featured in a few benchmarks with the R9 290X.

It looks like AMD gave four of their R9 290X graphics cards to the Russian overclocker that goes by the name Smoke. He was able to take four of AMD’s cards and to recapture the 3DMark 11 Performance world record from Gunslinger, who was at the time running four Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan graphics cards. He was able to achieve a score of 41531 marks in 3DMark 11 in the performance setting, an improvement over Gunslinger’s score of 39,629. This represents a continued roll on the part of the Russian team’s lead over Team Pure and Team Overclock.net.

However, Smoke didn’t stop ‘smoking’ the competition there (sorry, I couldn’t help the pun). He also took the 3DMark Vantage world record away from Nvidia, which was posted by our friend Kingpin. Unfortunately for Kingpin, Smoke was able to post a mind boggling score in 3DMark Vantage of 96500 marks which bested Nvidia’s dual Titan score of 91,219 marks. So, keep in mind that Nvidia was only running two Titans in this benchmark in order to achieve a similar score that AMD achieved with four R9 290Xs. However, it appears that only AMD graphics cards are able to bench in 3DMark Vantage in a four card configuration.

The fact that AMD’s Radeon R9 290X is selling for $550 is also a huge factor in this win for the company because Nvidia’s GTX Titan is a $1,000 graphics card, which means that AMD is capable of delivering significantly more value when you look at performance per dollar. The coming months should be very interesting as we see Nvidia cut the prices of their high-end graphics cards and the release of their GTX 780 Ti, which has yet to get specs or a price. But we suspect that card will purely be a reaction to today’s developments.